July 21, 2016

My son is up to no good- it is 1130 at night, it is cool and his air conditioning is set on high cool, his room reeks of bad choices and burnt sugar candles,

it’s the night before he has to be at camp in the morning as a cit for community service

For other bad choices he made months ago-

There is a strawberry moon in the sky, everyone’s posting about on the pages of Facebook.

Under that strawberry moon, Five minutes from now a woman will let her cat out, that cat will get hit by a car, or gobble a bird. Bad choice, I think, depending on the outcome, the cat may or may not agree.

There is a family sneaking over the border. There is a guard that drank gallons of coffee with dinner and just watched the Republican convention,

His gun is heavy but it might feel light after tonight.

There is a woman that just started to watch Game of Thrones; she has an early morning presentation, she will be so late they’ll start without her.

There is a girl who is slipping out of bed to go downstairs to sleep with the dog. She will wake with a stiff neck, her pajamas will reek of dog drool.

She’ll slip into bed with her mother first thing in the morning.

Her mother will rub her daughter’s neck and they’ll both sleep in for the first time since ever.

(Sleeping in is never a bad choice, in my poem.)

Bad choices are made every night,

Every second.

Of course, bad is relative,

Night is seven to some,

Mistakes are made in daylight hours, lots of them, millions of them inside every second-

Some of no consequence,

Some with tragic result.

But I’m writing this knowing my baby 16 year old idiot is on the verge of having a party while I sleep, undisturbed, because he doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does.

I’m awake.

It’s his choice to make,

Under this over ripe strawberry moon that has Facebook junkies fluttering outside their screen doors to snap a shot and share.

I’m too tired to share anything, or stop much, except what I can by

staying awake.

I can take notes. I can think about others far away from my corner

of the world and wish them safe travels.

I won’t sleep well.

Tomorrow, I think I will spend my time a bit more concerned about getting a little more exercise, being kinder to my children’s father, and not smoking at lunch.

July 13, 2016

If I was to step way far to the back of the room, a big room and look at a painting of my life, my whole life-

There would be wrinkled toes and clenched fists, a brilliant green swimming pool littered with nicklels tossed as bribery to slip my face inside the water, my smile on the first day of school in the Simplicity pattern dress my mom sewed the night before. It fell around me like a gown, white and peach daisies, holding my brothers hand inside my own.

There would be Linda Weaver‘s impossibly long legs, tucked under her body while we lounged away the morning in our sleeping bag forts.

There would be birthday parties I wasn’t invited to, and flute music dancing across the canvas, all the way through.

School and homework led me to a lifelong love affair with procrastination,

I’d need to make room for a thousand assignments I started,

and even more space for all of the projects I wish I had begun.

There would be Mountain Lakes, and tan O’Sullivan girls, the Eveleth‘s kitchen ,

The Club would loom over a lake, you’d be able to smell the fried chicken from Sundays.There’d be an inch or two devoted to my red, white and blue sunfish and the time I took a boat out in a storm and didn’t tip. Everyone capsized that afternoon,

or maybe no one else went out that day.

There would be the bathroom at the Tourne,

the floor would be littered with bottles of Colt 45.

There would be Oniko and Lisa, and a whole lot of boys. (Another canvas, another medium is needed for the boys of this life.)

There would be daddy saying goodbye outside of the Mountain lakes Club and again ten years later.

There was college, and nothing.

There was too much time in bathroom stalls, and not enough listening to the bands we were there to hear.

My first, my boy, my Collie bear. He’d be high on a rock in back yard in Dorchester

Singing “Circle of Life” from Lion King.

He’d be fencing in gym class, catching snakes outside the pool, Staying awake worrying about where to sit at lunch,

Most of the time, he’d be holding a ball.

Next came Kate.

As an infant, she held onto me, for 2 years, she dangled or clung to wherever I had available flesh.

These days, she smells like milk, her blue eyes smile, her mind is a millions miles away.

When I call her back, she comes back. We hold hands, though these days, not when someone’s watching.

Someone’s always watching.

Blonde, fierce, smarter than all of us put together, Katy is the one in the middle. She speaks to all of us, for all of us.

I’d see the South Shore Y, Walden, Wollaston, Cape Cod, James Paul with a cocktail, a dented mini van, and most recently, Quincy college. Most days, I love to come to work.

In the corner, or behind a moonlit night from last September, you might see Colin, the Colin I will see tomorrow at breakfast. He’d look mad. You’d see me, reaching towards him, and his back, clenched, his fists, clenched.

July 2, 2016

Here it is, the Friday of July 4th weekend. It’s raining. I’m home alone.

My fifteen year old son is at the mall. Instead of being happy he’s not in the woods, all I can think about is that he’s decided to expand his career as a juvenile delinquent to include shoplifting.

My twelve year old daughter is at a friend’s house. She knew I was staying home this evening to take care of some homework, so she made me dinner. Then she spoke with me at the dinner table. I call her my little miracle.

After explaining to me for the fourth time that nothing had happened at camp all day, and that she thinks we should never, ever discuss Donald Trump during a meal, she picked up my take home exam for Writing for Communications. It’s due on Tuesday, July 5th. Yup, the day after July 4th weekend. Did I mention it’s the Friday before July 4th weekend?

Tomorrow night, we are packing up and going to the woods for a week. We will have a cabin with four beds and an old fashioned grill, the kind that uses charcoal, by the front door. We will share an outhouse with the thirty other campers. We will keep our food in coolers that will swallow ice like it’s beer at a ball game. The perishable food will get warm quickly so I need to pack a lot of granola bars. And peanut butter. And bread.

That’s the thing. I need to pack.

My daughter pointed this out to me while she gazed with horror at my exam. It consists of about five different assignments to cover everything we discussed in class. I need to transform four newspaper stories into thirty second radio spots. Next on the list is to explain what it takes to write a good proposal, and I’m pretty sure he’s not looking for something that would work on the Bachelor. Before I’m done I need to create a cover letter as a person applying for job as a Student Employment Director. (I am not thrilled with the cover letter portion. I don’t want to be a student employment director, not even a little bit and I’m afraid my lack of enthusiasm will show.)

Did I mention it’s Saturday of July Fourth weekend and I don’t even know if I own a flashlight and we are going camping for a week?

For the grande finale, I need to write a complete story- not a partial story, a novel, a comic book, an article, a Facebook post, a tweet, or an epic poem- a complete story. It must contain the words mentor, autonomy, conflagration, enigmatic, pithy, contrarian and pedestrian. (I’m surprised he didn’t give us the option to turn it into a radio show, my professor does seem a bit partial to radio.)

I’ve been writing stories for a long time now, and I like to write them in my own voice. My own voice is not pithy. It is everything but pithy. This is why I stay away from Twitter and people that like to tell me to get to the point.

Let’s take a look at enigmatic as a place to start. To be clear, I love enigmas. I love being around enigmatic people. They tend to lurk in shadows wearing mysterious cloaks or impeccably cut suits, have perfect eyebrows and great back stories they’ll share if they have enough expensive whiskey in their system. But enigmatic people aren’t really crazy about me. I’m not pithy enough and I can’t afford even cheap whiskey. Even if I could, I wouldn’t buy it. Cheap whiskey is kind of gross. So I don’t think even the kindest of enigmatic souls would give me enough material for a whole story and since they make me nervous I don’t want to ask.

I might be able to write a story in my own voice about being a pedestrian or I could talk about the beginnings of a conflagration I found in Colin’s bedroom the other night.

I walk a lot of places, and have rather strong feelings about pedestrian rights. I, as a pedestrian, have the right to cross into the middle of the street into oncoming traffic if a. I successfully make eye contact with the driver, b. it is either under thirty five degrees or over seventy degrees, fahrenheit, or c.) I am wearing heels higher than three quarters of an inch.

That would be a pretty unpopular story, even with me, because the majority of us are drivers most of the time. Walking out into oncoming traffic is pretty stupid. I wouldn’t make a very sympathetic narrator.

I can’t talk about the fact that at one thirty in the morning I was woken with a very strong feeling I was overseas in Amsterdam, I think. I dreamed I was perched on a bar stool in the middle of a bar that had been open without closing for business since 1987. As soon as it became clear I was actually in my basement in Milton, Massachusetts, I crept upstairs to investigate.

My son was holding a pipe with a bowl big enough to fit a baby’s head. It was overflowing, a tiny bonfire of sorts, and he was lifting to his lips when I opened the door. Until he gets a little smarter, or a lot older, he hasn’t earned the right of anonymity in my stories, photographic absence from my Facebook page on the first day of school and allowing me twenty four access to his cell phone. “This is not the path to autonomy!” I whispered to my son and his friend. I didn’t want to wake up the dog. The smell of pot makes her chase her tail and bark at the rug. This would then wake my daughter who was sleeping with the dog.

Even though he hasn’t earned any rights to privacy, I’ll respect them anyway and leave that story out.

The word that really concerns me is contrarian. I have always defined myself as a pacifist, so I’m not really comfortable with the contrarian point of view, though I guess one could be contrary and peaceful at the same time.

My son might disagree, basing his opinion on my position on mobile devices. According to my son, every other teenager on the planet has their cell phone available at all times-while they are in the shower, during final exams, at Aunt Margie’s funeral.

I am also a party of one when I insist he put the phone inside the phone case. According to Colin, it shouldn’t matter that the device cost seven hundred dollars if the teenager has a strange and steadfast position about not needing a phone case. Other parents don’t make their teenagers use phone cases, ever. It wouldn’t bother other parents at all if they went out and spent thirty five dollars on a phone case the girl at the Verizon store with the really cool tattoos, pale pink hair and bubble gum heels recommended.

It bothers me.

Why did I believe this unusual expert in retail telecommunications? I believed her because I am firmly convinced that everyone in the world knows more about my son than I do.

I bet he would have bought and used the case if he’d gone to the Verizon store without me. He would have listened to her.

I bet he’s a pot smoking, rule breaking, dirty clothes under the bed hiding, community service avoiding teenager because he saw me jay walk so often when he was a child. Actually, I’d grab his hand and and drag him across the street, while he squeaked “Mom, shouldn’t we wait for the light?”

Next time I have the urge to parent someone, I’ll mentor a cat. I think it’s pretty safe to say most of them are already screwed up, or at least they are so enigmatic, no one will be able to tell if I do any damage.

I’ll visit the online Quincy Animal shelter after I write this story. I think I could use a cat.

Did I mention I need to pack?

I’m a jaywalker and a procrastinator.

Considering that I was his role model, I’m lucky he’s nice to animals, does well in school and talks to me from time to time. He’ll even discuss politics over dinner.